"NASA is preparing to send a woman and a man to the Moon in 2024, in what will    
   be the first mission to the lunar surface in 52 years. The new spacesuit being    
   designed for the mission is sleek and ultra high-tech, with a swath of   
   features    
   not possible during the Apollo era. Here’s what you need to know about the    
   Artemis spacesuit and how it will take lunar exploration to the next level.   
      
   On December 14, 1972, when Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison    
   Schmitt lifted off from the lunar surface, no one in their right minds would    
   have believed it would take a half-century to do it again. But here we are,   
   all    
   these decades later, as NASA prepares for the upcoming Artemis missions to    
   finally return humans to the Moon.   
      
   NASA, along with its various partners, are in the midst of developing the    
   requisite technologies to make it happen, including the gigantic SLS rocket, a    
   lunar lander (the Blue Origin-led project seems to be progressing nicely), an    
   unpressurized rover, and instruments to collect and sample water ice, among    
   other space toys. And of course, NASA is also working on its next lunar    
   spacesuit, which it’s calling the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit,   
   or    
   xEMU for short.   
      
   NASA recently disclosed the cost of Artemis, saying the project will require   
   $28    
   billion in funding from 2021 to 2025. Of this cost, $518 million will be    
   allocated to developing and manufacturing the xEMUs. That’s a hefty price   
   tag,    
   considering NASA has prior experience building suits for the Apollo missions    
   and, more recently, for International Space Station astronauts. And indeed,   
   xEMU    
   is visually similar to the suits worn by astronauts during ISS spacewalks, but    
   that’s basically where the comparison ends.   
      
   “The xEMU has been designed from the very beginning to be safer and have   
   fewer    
   catastrophic failure modes than any of its predecessors,” Chris Hansen, the   
   EVA    
   Office manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, explained in an   
   email.    
   (EVA stands for extravehicular activity, which is NASA-speak for anything done    
   outside of a vehicle, whether that’s in Earth’s orbit or on the surface of    
   another planet.)"   
      
   See:   
      
   https://gizmodo.com/nasa-s-next-moonsuit-is-going-to-be-damned-i   
   pressive-1845393104   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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